WTF is up with this action anyway? I go weeks without seeing this happen and then one day I'm playing and every sim in my house is dropping whatever I tell them to do to take a picture with someone! It boggles the mind!

I looked all over and in Retuner "social interactions" I only found "take romantic photo together". So I looked under the smart phone in "by object" and the only thing there is "take self photo".

Does anyone know where to stop people from taking photos with other sims autonomously? I'd rather just keep that user directed, it's driving me batty! And I mean they are doing it so fast I can't even stop them sometimes!

I found "TakePhotoWithA" and "TakePhotoWithB" under By Object > Sim, but when I tested them by disabling User Directed, it didn't remove "Take Photo Together" from my test Sim's Friendly interactions.

I also ran my typical search tools on FullEATuning and the contents of gamedata.package, but didn't turn up anything useful searching on either "takephototogether" or "takephotowith".

Each EP has a package file with xml files, and I've suspected for a while that those hold settings that aren't in the gameplaydata package. If I get time this weekend, I'll extract the package file for University Life and see if I can find any useful settings in it.

Meanwhile, if anyone has suggestions for other search terms, I'll be happy to give them a try.

I checked UL's package file, and there aren't any ITUN files in there. Did a search for "photo" in the XML files anyway, but only got two results, neither of which are related to the question at hand.

Also tried filename searches on "photo", "ep9", and "jock" hoping to turn up an ITUN file that looks promising, but nothing seems relevant. Since there are only about 20 ITUNs with "photo" in the name, here's the list, in case someone else wants to look it over:

This doesn't really answer the original question, but usually when I find sims are fixated on the same (often silly) interaction or two and a reasonable explanation is not evident such as I just got them a new ice cream maker or something like that but failed to tune out the over the top advertising such objects transmit, a MC Reset of the sims and/or their residential lot tends to kick them back into more typical autonomy. Except in Uni World and when dealing with NPC roommates, all bets are off there.

Another non-tuning solution would be to set the Sims' hidden Jock Influence skill to -1 via MC. That would remove all interactions gained from levels of Jock Influence. Of course how viable that is depends on your story and goals for the specific Sims.

I didn't test it, but I'm doubtful about "TakeCellPhonePhotoPaired_Sim" being the one, because the ITUN file refers to EP3, which is Late Night. "Take Photo Together" has the Jock icon beside it, which leads me to think it was added in University Life.

I did a little testing in Retuner of "TakeSelfPhotoWithA" and "TakeSelfPhotoWithB" by disallowing User-Directed. In my tests that didn't remove the "Take Photo Together" option from the active Sim's interactions. My Sims almost never take autonomous photos together, so I didn't test disabling autonomous.

I did a little testing in Retuner of "TakeSelfPhotoWithA" and "TakeSelfPhotoWithB" by disallowing User-Directed. In my tests that didn't remove the "Take Photo Together" option from the active Sim's interactions.

Disabling User Directed won't stop the interaction from being available it only determines if an active sim can only be able to use the interaction by the user as long as Autonomy is disabled but even then it's not a given as the game can override it.
In other words if User Directed is enabled and Autonomy disabled then the active sim can only use when told to.
If User Directed is disabled and Autonomy enabled an active sim can use it autonomously and by the user.
If both User Directed and Autonomy are disabled while very rare the game may override it when ever it want's. I've only come across 4 interactions that the game will do that with namely React To Ghosts and Confess to Being a Vampire those would require a more extreme method that should only be used as a last resort.

Which brings to how to completely remove an interaction from the game and making it totally unavailable for use by all sims and the game will never override it as the interaction becomes invalid.
To remove it completely you have to disable both User Directed and Autonomy and remove the allowable Ages for both Actor and Target (if available as ITUN's seem to only use Available Ages and standard Social Interactions use both at least if going by the S3PE method not sure about Retuner).